a year already? wow.

happy first birthday to baby jude, daughter of annie and helen.

yay for their beautiful fambly and their love. their building of a home filled with love is an example to everyone. they continue to be harbingers of hope and it always leaves me feeling gratitude.

and yesterday's minor storm in a teacup has led to some fruitful dialogue. for that too i am grateful. where there was anger, there is peace being sown. and i haven't had to let go of my conscience to be a part of it. which is important to me.

so, i'm moving on. and amen to it all.

LB

yup. good people...

pete has this analogous thing (for something philosophically useful but i can't remember what it is right now) where he talks about falling in love. it goes something like this:

you can have a list of characteristics, attributes, traits, talents or interests you want in a person and you carry it around looking for someone who'll fit the bill. but that's not what you fall in love with. you fall in the love with the person. that is, the human that is made up of those characteristics, attributes, traits, talents or interests and maybe a whole lot of other stuff besides. maybe you fall in love with someone other than what you thought you wanted or needed, who doesn't match that list you were carrying round at all. when it happens, whether they match that list or not, the list doesn't seem to matter much anymore. you can't fall in love with a list of characteristics. what you love is a whole person.

as i see it, what you love is the ineffable them-ness.

and sometimes i get to wondering if community, or indeed church, is no different...

HFASS keeping it absolutely Real

for as far away as they may be, i'm glad Nadia and her people are there. for they tick many boxes on the list. and then there's the them-ness.

everytime i think i'm done with it all, i am reminded of what matters most...

LB

indigo hosannas

this poem from today's writer's almanac reminded me of the garden at the degrazia gallery/house in tucson. adoring love drips from the page... timeless, dazzling devotion...

Wind chimes ping and tangle on the patio.
In gusty winds this wild, sparrow hawks hover
and bob, always the crash of indigo
hosannas dangling on strings. My wife ties copper
to turquoise from deserts, and bits of steel
from engines I tear down. She strings them all
like laces of babies' shoes when the squeal
of their play made joyful noise in the hall.

Her voice is more modest than moonlight,
like pearl drops she wears in her lobes.
My hands find the face of my bride.
I stretch her skin smooth and see bone.
Our children bring children to bless her, her face
more weathered than mine. What matters
is timeless, dazzling devotion—not rain,
not Eden gardenias, but cactus in drought,
not just moons of deep sleep, not sunlight or stars,
not the blue, but the darkness beyond.

- "The Waltz We Were Born For" by Walt McDonald, from Blessings the Body Gave. © Ohio State University Press, 1998.

love was never meant to be restrained or reserved... at least not to a 4 like me. i wonder if mcdonald is a 4... seeing beauty in the darkness beyond...

LB

same story

the screen-saver scoops up photographs and creates a mosaic. and as the images multiply, they combine to become yet another photograph - an image of my little nephew, minutes old. swirls of red paint i made last summer with my right hand colour his florid cheek, sylvia meets jonah charging in the bend of his arm... and a favourite moment of you, laughing with head thrown back, melts deep into the black of his eye...

Even if I were to stretch this letter out, God forbid, to a thousand pages, would I ever be able to convey my full story to you? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that our stories in their fullness will always be hidden from each other and that all those whiskered old men and bonneted old women looking out at us from their photographs in the family album will always remain mysteries to us even if, like me, they happen to have written their memoirs. And yet I believe that all is not lost. Maybe we can never know each other's stories in their fullness, but I believe we can know them in their depth for the reason that in their depth we all have the same story.

Whether we're rich or poor, male or female, a nineteenth-century Swiss jeweler like Isaac Golay in his oversized frock coat, or a twentieth-century American clergyman like me with a penchant for writing books, or a young squirt celebrating his twenty-first birthday in the twenty-first century like you, our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to beleive in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.


- from letter to benjamin, by frederick buechner, in the longing for home (1996)

all witnesses to one another's becoming... it was never your destination i cared about, just as i've long since forgotten the punchline. your laughter made the air vibrate...
i watch you in the transformation...

LB

big sister, little brother

*sniff*

i hope Lochlann will be as much of a blessing to Sequoia as Ewan has been, and continues to be, to me.

LB

au revoir, beloveds

with tomorrow night as my last night sleeping north of the border, tonight marked my last night, for a while at least, at the tuesday table.

i am so grateful, and always will be, for the deep connection i have forged with the folks around that table. those who challenge me in a way i have never been challenged anywhere else. because, as i said to them tonight, these distinct voices around the room, i carry in my mind like a prism. each one has a unique take on the world and together their voices make for harmony.
it has been a real gift to have their individual and collective presence in my life. and i realise now just how much i will miss them, their constancy. miss the reflecting i get to do each week as i replay our conversations and look at the scribbles in my notebook and feel them adding shape and texture and colour to the themes that unfold.

i don't think any of them know just how much influence they have had on me over the years. i realised too tonight that the sharing of a journey together has been so valuable, so important to me, in a way i don't yet fully see. we have shared memory and that strikes deep for me. i value it more highly than i can find adequate words for. and i'm not even sure why that is so important. perhaps... perhaps because they have stayed true as much as they have stayed constant. they have my trust.

as i move back to the town that was home for many years to connect with my biological and blended family and do the work of allowing myself to be a part of that just as i am, i know i have my family of choice back here. a table to come back to. and wherever team fury or i am in the world, they will always be family to me.

so, with deep deep love and immense gratitude for getting me to here, for making tuesday the new sunday and for always holding on,
it is with a smile and with some tears, i finally hear myself saying, this really is it. i'm moving.

thanks family.
i'll be back soon.

c,xo

love: when loneliness is shared

shirley and i went to the movies last night and saw, let the right one in.

what follows are some wonderings in the aftermath...(no plot spoilers, but *lots* of thematic ones)



shirley and i both loved it. it really is as good as they said it'd be. and it left one with so many questions... questions about untold stories within the story... the title alone is open to layers of interpretation, full of ambiguity, and the ending is an almost perfect "..."

was it scary? yes. is it horror? yes. but not gratutiously so. a great deal is left to the imagination. i was ready to cover my eyes numerous times but i think only once did i actually look away. i struggle with gore, but this is not a slasher film. the violence is portrayed and concealed in some clever ways. the scariest moment was for me not even a moment of violence but downright creepy in the way the ending of the japanese horror movie, ring is creepy, or the monster with eyes in his hands in pan's labyrinth is creepy. nightmarish.
funny? yes. in a way that the horror genre often is. and poignantly sad and beautiful without ever descending into mawkishness or melodrama.
this is perhaps one of the most restrained horror films i've seen. it's a dark, DARK, fairytale. it's a children's story made for adults and filmed very much from a child's perspective.

for me, science fiction and fantasy at their best are deep with metaphor, pushing at the edges of reality so as to make comment on what we call 'normality'. when the everyday meets the fantastical we have to question how we would react if we were in the same circumstance but we've been unhoused in order to be provoked. something is put off kilter. the line between the real and the unreal messed with.
the vampire myth is in large part about the psychosexual, where sex meets death, sex being equated with both violence and a life force, hunger, and not being able to have what you want without someone else paying a price. but where the vampire myth deals with what we do with our perverse desire, this takes a totally different route...

so we find themes of difference... of love... innocence... what it is to be a child... cruelty and manipulation... aging... need... love without sex... and a fascinating provocation about gender ambiguity... not for a second do i mean that to not 'fit' the assumed heteronormative is to be equated to being a vampire, ie to be not-human, or a monster. this film somehow managed to deftly avoid such an equation, while at the same time placing gender ambiguity as absolutely central to the story, as is the companion theme of being an outsider, overlooked or bullied by society, of being excluded and to experience deep loneliness, of wanting to be something other than a victim, of wanting to love and be loved...to be invited in...to let someone else in...of not being able to change who you are...

there is something very challenging about how we confuse sex with love and needing to sexually fit in order to experience love and partnership. that the characters are pre-pubescent (or right on the cusp) allows this to be exposed. sex for them is something apart, distant, not yet... if anything sex is something to be feared, for it is both unknown, and will get in the way of love... and one wonders where there story will go after the credits roll... that tragedy is yet to strike... that what they share is potentially impossible... because it's going to get complicated and upsetting the moment full sexual desire kicks in... love will inevitably turn to perversion...

it is therefore ironic in an unsettling way that the movie was preceded by an advert for a sparkling orange drink. it featured two dolls in a very basic stop motion animation - think action man and barbie - they are in the act of foreplay. they touch and kiss. but when the towel the male doll is wearing drops, barbie is horrified to find he lacks genitals. they lie side by side in bed, her on her side away from him, him on his back. the tagline appears...

some bits are crucial.

now i get it. this soft drink prides itself on having orangey bits in it. we were meant to laugh and think, oh, yes, that's clever. but instead, shirley and myself both turned quizzically and said, "What the...?" imagine they were not dolls but real people... and the film proved to be a welcome (albeit inadvertant) response...

what bits are crucial...? what bits of you are the ones that love another? is innocent love without sex an impossibility? a fantasy? what is it that is lost when we grow up? none of this is answered, but is provoked... when we love someone and want them to be our most special of friends, what are we looking for? what is it that is being shared? loneliness perhaps. and what does true love (if such a thing exists) overlook or accept?

if wikipedia is anything to go by, the novel from which the film is adapted, seems to have been very different, or at least, more definitive, more complex than the screenplay (written by the author himself), which left aspects wide open to audience interpretation. now knowing the back story from the novel puts a completely new spin on certain characters and scenes. but it says something about the difference in translating a novel to film - they are entirely different mediums. i can't decide if i want to read it or not. there's an american remake of the book about to get underway(rather than a remake of the film - which i take to mean the screenplay will be different) and one can only imagine it'll be a very different take on the story.

the film is beautifully shot. at times it is almost like a graphic novel - the camera held steady, frozen. the lighting is incredibly used to great effect. brilliantly original. standing in an empty train station after the movie was downright creepy. it is the use of electric light against snow and concrete as much as the darkness that is unsettling. the score is beautiful too.
but the real beauty is down to the lead actors who give seemingly effortless embodiment of their characters and show a subtlety that most adult actors would love to achieve.

and at the centre of the film is a scene of such quiet beauty, both visually and in terms of the script, that i found myself choking back tears at the vulnerability and acceptance it expressed in both the central characters. one of those moments when you know this is the scene on which everything else hangs. i found myself making associations with moments in both boys don't cry and don't look now. of showing what physical and unapologetic, emotional tenderness looks like.

if there's a lasting question embodied in these characters, it is perhaps, what is it to love despite difference? what is it to accept another as they are? this is a love story about two children who are in different ways vulnerable and lonely. and perhaps that's what makes this horror tale so compelling, that neither of them attempt to conceal their outsiderness from the other. they are different from others and from each other. and they love anyway. is innocence lost the moment we dehumanise the other? when we push the other away because they are different, because there are things they don't want us to see in them, when we reject...? how do we accept someone who feels rejectable?

the vampire gore of this film is not the real horror of this story. the violence is part of the package. that might be problematic on one level, but beyond the blood, this beautifully captures the enduring power of the vampire-mortal love myth and does something really fresh with it. it gives us two characters who draw compassion from the viewer and reminds us that it is a tragedy to be trapped in eternity without growing old. we fear death, but to not have death is not a gift, but a kind of hell.

what bits of me are crucial to who i am? to make me worthy of your love? to make me human? how often is the unspoken subtext of human relationship, if you knew who i really am, would you love me anyway? will you share this loneliness with me?

the innocent love in us ignores the in-spite-of, and says, yes. in that moment love is more powerful than death, and sex. and such love is therefore horrifically, tragically and yet still beautifully blind... it ignores difference, the external body and even the fear of death, and defiantly says,

i know. but can we go steady anyway?

which reminds me of this line from neil gaiman.

right, back to packing boxes i go.

LB

note: the version released on dvd in the usa does not feature the original theatrical (english) subtitles. apparently a new version is going to be brought out following complaints at the simplified and inferior translation.

the power of digression

be still my beating heart.

i just washed off the grime of the day with this as the soundtrack. don't know if i posted it before but it's worth recommending again. i find this to be deliciously good. and beautiful.

LB

lost love 2

no amount of coffee
no amount of crying
no amount of whisky
no amount of wine
no no no no no
nothing else will do
i gotta have you
i gotta have you

- the weepies, gotta have you on :: Say I Am You ::

so much of life is spent living with what you cannot have, however much you gotta have it...

LB

for lost love

we love with our innards

Ms. Tippett: Something I've always been intrigued by, though, in my conversations with Orthodox Christians, is how this attunement to, to the senses is also very earthy, also has a very earthy side. It's not all just about gorgeous images in worship. And, you know, I just, I wanted to read this passage that you quoted in your book Incarnate Love, which, of course, is a central theme of the Easter story. And, you know, the example you used of talking about this is, is how it was articulated in, by Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, right?

Mr. Guroian: Yes.

Ms. Tippett: And you wrote, he said, "Alyosha, my boy, so I want to live and go on living even if it's contrary to the rules of logic, even if I do not believe in the divine order of things. The sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart, so is the blue sky, and so are some human beings, even though I often don't know why I like them. I'll get drunk on my own emotion. I love these sticky little leaves and the blue sky. That's what, you don't love those things with reason, with logic. You love them with your innards, with your belly."

Mr. Guroian: Yes. And of course, the irony, which is so often a device used by Dostoevsky is that the principal atheist who's rebelling against God in the novel is articulating precisely what the Christian experience is or ought to be...

from this conversation.

LB